Quotes by British Authors - Page 492

It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.
Joseph Conrad
He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly.
Kate Atkinson
Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Choose Love, Love! Without the sweet life ofLove, living is a burden - as you have seen.
Elif Shafak
The Bible is the most important part of your faith.
Elizabeth George
I felt emotions of gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me. Half surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away by them, and forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
I had a dream about a motorcycle," said Harry, remembering suddenly. "It was flying."Uncle Vernon nearly crashed into the car in front. He turned right around in his seat and yelled at Harry, his face like a gigantic beet with a mustache: "MOTORCYCLES DON'T FLY!"Dudley and Piers sniggered."I know they don't," said Harry. "It was only a dream.
J.K. Rowling
Nothing perhaps is strange once you have accepted life itself the great strange business which includes all lesser strangeness.
Rose Macaulay
Using Facebook is like taking a Dyson to your spare time.
Gemini Adams
Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?
Virginia Woolf
Your disbelief cures nothing.
Sarah Kane
Did I imagine the castle, the dungeon, the ritual orgies and violations? Did Lucy, Billy, Samuel, Eliza, Shirley and Kato make it all up? I went back to the industrial estate and found the castle. It was an old factory that had burned to the ground, but the charred ruins of the basement remained. I closed my eyes and could see the black candles, the dancing shadows, the inverted pentagram, the people chanting through hooded robes. I could see myself among other children being abused in ways that defy imagination. I have no doubt now that the cult of devil worshippers was nothing more than a ring of paedophiles, the satanic paraphernalia a cover for their true lusts: the innocent bodies of young children.
Alice Jamieson
One of the great things about anarchy is that it’s hard to get it organized.
George Hammond
You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.
Neil Gaiman
If you seem to be happy in this place of solitude, you will acquire a great reputation for wisdom, and I know, by my own experience, that under the cloak of a great reputation it is possible to hide whole treasures of folly. (“The Story of Princess Zulkais and the Prince Kalilah”)
William Beckford
Laws die books never.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
When you rise in the morning, form a resolution to make the day a happy one for a fellow creature.
Sydney Smith
My own general thesis was somewhat to this effect: that Artists have worried the world by being wantonly, needlessly, and gratuitously progressive. Politicians have to be progressive; that is, they have to live in the future, because they know they have done nothing but evil in the past. But Artists, who have been right from the beginning of the world, who were, perhaps, the only people who were right even in the beginning of the world, decorating pottery or designing rude frescoes on the rock when other people were fighting or offering human sacrifice, they have no right to despise their own past.
G.K. Chesterton
The secret to success is constancy of purpose.
Benjamin Disraeli
I love being aroused. I love how that feeling overcomes me, as I look at a man’s erect cock, as I feel his hands ripping my clothes from my body, as the air caresses my naked skin, and how I feel like I’m blossoming like a flower.
Fiona Thrust
My hopes were all dead --- struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive. I looked at my love: that feeling which had been my master's --- which he had created; it shivered in my heart, like a suffering child in a cold cradle; sickness and anguish had seized it; it could not seek Mr Rochester's arms --- it could not derive warmth from his breast. Oh, never more could it turn to him; for faith was blighted -- confidence destroyed!
Charlotte Brontë
I—I didn't think—""That," said Professor McGonagall, "is obvious.
J.K. Rowling
Until you understand your customers - deeply and genuinely - you cannot hope to serve them
Rasheed Ogunlaru
Those societies in which seriousness, tradition, conformity and adherence to long-established - often god-prescribed - ways of doing things are the strictly enforced rule, have always been the majority across time and throughout the world. Such people are not known for their sense of humour and lightness of touch; they rarely break a smile. To them, change is always suspect and usually damnable, and they hardly ever contribute to human development. By contrast, social, artistic and scientific progress as well as technological advance are most evident where the ruling culture and ideology give men and women permission to play, whether with ideas, beliefs, principles or materials. And where playful science changes people's understanding of the way the physical world works, political change, even revolution, is rarely far behind.
Paul Kriwaczek
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,But make allowance for their doubting too;If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,Or being hated, don't give way to hating,And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wiseIf you can dream - and not make dreams your master;If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;If you can meet with Triumph and DisasterAnd treat those two impostors just the same;If you can bear to hear the truth you've spokenTwisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out toolsIf you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,And lose, and start again at your beginningsAnd never breathe a word about your loss;If you can force your heart and nerve and sinewTo serve your turn long after they are gone,And so hold on when there is nothing in youExcept the will which says to them: 'Hold on!'If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,If all men count with you, but none too much;If you can fill the unforgiving minuteWith sixty seconds' worth of distance run,Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
Rudyard Kipling
Again, we find that the space standards of twenty-first century luxury are below the required minimum for dockworkers in 1962.
Owen Hatherley
There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.
Quentin Crisp
He finds he cannot think of the dying men at all. Into his mind instead strays the picture of More on the scaffold, seen through the veil of rain: his body, already dead, folding back neatly from the impact of the axe. The cardinal when he fell had no persecutor more relentless than Thomas More. Yet, he thinks, I did not hate him. I exercised my skills to the utmost to persuade him to reconcile with the king. And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.
Hilary Mantel
The author chuckles at the resistance to using a prepared, written liturgy in prayer. He compares it to being unwilling to dress in any clothing we did not make ourselves, or being unwilling to drive a car we did not construct entirely by ourselves.
N.T. Wright
Conversion is not the smooth, easy-going process some men seem to think... It is wounding work, this breaking of the hearts, but without wounding there is no saving... Where there is grafting there will always be a cutting, the graft must be let in with a wound; to stick it onto the outside or to tie it on with a string would be of no use. Heart must be set to heart and back to back or there will be no sap from root to branch. And this, I say, must be done by a wound, by a cut.
John Bunyan
Look at the stars,” said Tim. “Don’t you ever wonder what they’re for?” The Night was an open book of constellations.“They’re for the same as everything else, “said Sam. They’re just for themselves.” The stars silently agreed.
Toby Forward
Smiles form the channels of a future tear.
Lord Byron
Ah, Chantal... Now I think I know how it feels to fly on a trapeze.
Madeleine Brent
It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored in climate that seem to me the happiest but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both.
T.S Eliot
The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other - he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy - but it would be the only strictly correct method. My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.
C.S. Lewis
If knowledge is not democratized, power can never be.
Steven Rose
People in that crowd want to make poverty history, but NOT if they have to pay for it themselves
Ben Elton
I let out a gasp at the surprise with him getting to me so fast. It was kind of dating superman in that way, and instead of the cape and spandex, I got wings and a Armani suit!
Stephanie Hudson
Let's start a new tomorrow, today.
Neil Gaiman
In that instance, my body had decided that this baby was not to be and had ended it. This time, it is my mind that has decided that this baby was not to be. I don't believe one's decision is more valid than the other. They both know me. They are both equally capable of deciding what is right.
Caitlin Moran
These are the things you don’t say, even to someone you love.
Johnny Rich
. . . Most falls aren't free -- there is always the tension, it seems to me, between what you are falling from and what you are falling to.
Peter R. Pouncey
Because of the Resurrection, our natural reaction must be to get past our emotional reactions as quickly as possible and reflect on what happened in light of the cross and the resurrection and our own baptisms into that defining reality – to the life-giving and life-affirming waters of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Megan McKenna
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order
Virginia Woolf
If I could only escape, if I could only escape... he murmured the words to himself a dozen times; then metaphorically shook himself for being so impractical, so romantic, so dutiless.
John Fowles
When the hunt for new sources of energy had at one point got particularly frantic, one bright young chap suddenly spotted that one place which had never used up all its available energy was - the past. And with the sudden rush of blood to the head that such insights tend to induce, he invented a way of mining it that very same night, and within a year huge tracts of the past were being drained of all their energy and simply wasting away. Those who claimed that the past should be left unspoilt were accused of indulgingin an extremely expensive form of sentimentality.
Douglas Adams
He says, "I would walk around the township and I could point them out, which girls had been abused. You could see it in them. There's a luminosity to incest. The taboo is so strong and the damage so great. Luminosity--do you understand? It travels across oceans and down generations. They shine with it.
Emma Brockes
The practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness or virtue—involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows... It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence... Laws and moral precepts are directed to the end of curbing the cosmic process.
Thomas Henry Huxley
These people go on to tell us that mobile phones will cook our children’s ears, that long-haul flights will fill our legs with thrombosis and that meat is murder. They want an end to all deaths – and it doesn’t stop there. They don’t even see why anyone should have to suffer from a spot of light bruising. Every week, as we filmed my television chat show, food would be spilt on the floor, and every week the recording would have to be stopped so it could be swept away. ‘What would happen,’ said the man from health and safety, ‘if a cameraman were to slip over?’ ‘Well,’ I would reply, ‘he’d probably have to stand up again.
Jeremy Clarkson
Growing older does not seem to make you more certain. It simply presents you with more reasons for doubt.
Jessie Burton
Until our own time, history focussed on man the achiever; the higher the achiever the more likely it was that the woman who slept in his bed would be judged unworthy of his company. Her husband's fans recoiled from the notion that she might have made a significant contribution towards his achievement of greatness. The possibility that a wife might have been closer to their idol than they could ever be, understood him better than they ever could, could not be entertained.
Germaine Greer
Every man has a right to utter what he thinks is truth and every other man has a right to knock him down for it.
Samuel Johnson
You're a poem?' I repeated.She chewed her lower lip. 'If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose whose world was swallowed by the sea.''Isn't it hard to be three things at the same time?''What's your name?''Enn.''So you are Enn,' she said. 'And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same time?
Neil Gaiman
Sometimes if you want to stand out,you at first have to blend in.
Anthony T.Hincks
The terrors of the future will not come from the drab repressions of an encroaching bureaucracy, but from the neon lights of a thousand supermarkets, the sounds of a million automobile accidents and from the public cremation of the dead astronauts as they return to earth.
Christopher Riche Evans
People tend to find books when they are ready for them.
Neil Gaiman
Children should be able to live a life free from electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure and radio frequency (RF) radiation pollution and it is time that we all took a stand against this.
Steven Magee
Prayer in the sense of petition asking for things is a small part of it confession and penitence are its threshold adoration its sanctuary the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine.
C.S. Lewis